Lily van der Stokker

Lily van der Stokker is a Dutch artist based in Amsterdam and New York. Her bold, colourful works most often take the form of large-scale decorative wall drawings, and have a child-like innocence and an adolescent naivety. They deal, in a disarmingly unashamed and exuberant way, with ideas of beauty, love, relationships, family and the everyday. Despite, or perhaps because of, their apparent simplicity, van der Stokker’s works are often challenging and she has come to be seen as an increasingly important artist in the growing discourse of post-feminist practice.

Her feminism resides in her awareness that, as she put it, “There’s no such thing as gender-neutral art.” And she insists that we recognize these ingrained biases through her bold approach to form and content, producing work that she knows will be judged by some as “girlie” and thus lacking in seriousness, intellect, and rigor. With her adeptness at luring viewers with captivating (and seemingly innocuous) hand-painted illustrations, humorous texts, and sheer scale and then surprising them with content that is remarkably honest—by turns subversively friendly or bitingly critical and addressing such fraught subjects as power dynamics, social marginalization, or even the machinations of the art world—she has smartly aligned herself with the enduring and boundary-pushing strategies of satire, parody, and caricature.

Born in 1954, she received her education in the Netherlands whereafter she moved to New York in 1983. Her work found prominence in the early 1990s as she began exhibiting in exhibitions and institutions across the world including the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.